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B 3227 
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IS THE UNIVERSE 
SELF-CENTRED 

OR 

GOD-CENTRED? 



AN EXAMINATION OF THE SYSTEMS, 
EUCKEN AND BERGSON. 



PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS 

DELIVERED TO THE 
SWEDENBORG SCIENTIFIC ASSOCIATION 

BY 

FRANK SEWALL, D. D. 



PHILADELPHIA, PA. 

SWEDENBORG SCIENTIFIC ASSOCIATION 

1913 






IS THE UNIVERSE SELF-CENTERED OR GOD- 
CENTERED? 

The research, both of science and philosophy, at the present 
day, seems to be centered upon the subject of life — its origin 
and its nature. Running through the various theories pro- 
posed, there appears to be a common conception of life as a 
flow — a flux. The questions of efflux, a flow from; or of in- 
flux involving a flow into matter from something above ; or of 
afflux — a flowing toward something ; and what that something 
is,— these are all for the time quite overlooked in the interest 
centered upon the flux itself ; — life a flow ; consciousness a 
flow ; all Being a flow. 

It is an interesting coincidence that this doctrine of the flux 
should be the leading principle in the two philosophic systems 
that most widely occupy the thinking world to-day — those of 
Eucken and Bergson. 

While science, conscious of its limitations, contents itself 
with studying the processes, or the flow of life in nature, these 
philosophers would seem, at least, to desire to penetrate higher, 
and to arrive at the nature of life itself or of that which flows. 

The question that especially interests us in the present dis- 
cussion is — as to the origin and nature of the life as so con- 
ceived; in other words, in its center and source. Is it God- 
derived or self derived? Is it an influx or flow from the Di- 
vine Love and Wisdom, as a Spiritual Sun or Life-center, 
into nature and into man? or is, it a product of nature itself 
evolving both man and his God ? 

EUCKEN. 

It would seem, indeed, at first glance, as if both these 
philosophers had found the world centered in something above 
nature and above self. Both find our world, our individual 
life, encompassed in a universal flow of something quite dis- 
tinct from gross or inert matter. Eucken calls it the Spirit, or 
an "activity and Power encompassing and transcending the 
world ;" a life that we discern "different from the life of the 



FOUR 

senses" and that we perceive as a "whole," "whose products are 
Truths, Goodness, Beauty," which rise into a "realm of in- 
wardness." 

This life, says Eucken, is "not a creation of man alone," 
since "it must come to him from the universe." So it is the 
universe seeking or creating its centre rather than the centre, 
the universe. It must, says Eucken, "form a new stage of 
reality into which man, who first belongs to nature, is raised 
in the progres of his life." 

This same seeming separation of the natural and the spirit- 
ual degrees or orders, — followed by their commingling and 
their reduction to a common human or material level, — is ap- 
parent throughout Eucken's entire system, if such his arbitrary 
construction of theology and religion can be called. 

"Spiritual energy in civilization has power (he declares) 
only in a revelation of an independent spiritual world." Here, 
he says, is the threshold of religion. "All spiritual creation, 
moral action, artistic production, appears to be found in the 
living presence of a higher Power." 

Hence comes the "Universal Religion." It encompasses all 
life instead of making a separate realm from which comes a 
"peculiar influence." But it is through the peculiar influences, 
— i. e., I suppose, the consciously personal and individual ex- 
periences of this universal religious flow, — that there comes 
to be a "Characteristic Religion," and this is first reached 
through the checks, the shocks that human life exhibits, like 
the collision of atoms in the world's evolution. Spiritual life 
is roused to a conception of Deity, and, in "developing its re- 
lation to the Divine, engenders a Characteristic Religion." 

Here we have an adroit almost amusing adaptation of the 
law of evolution by the collision of material particles, to the 
evolution of the religious sense, and so, finally, of the idea of 
God, as if the thought of God were not necessarily the very 
spring of all religious conception and action as such, and not 
their outgrowth; as if, again, the circumference can create 
its centre, — not as something that has necessarily been there 
all the time, but as something that for the individual now first 






FIVE 

exists, thus concentrating the universal religious flow into an 
individual experience. 

Eucken goes on to show how, at the apex of man's rise, 
there comes the approach of Deity to man ; and this, as not 
limited to "occasional points of contact I" That is, as I under- 
stand him, not in single Incarnations. God makes man the 
partaker of the fulness of His own life: "its deepest mystery 
is that the Divine enters into the Human without losing its 
divinity." "Man becomes immediately conscious of the in- 
finite and eternal, of what transcends the world." 

It would be interesting to know just on what facts in re- 
corded human experience Eucken is basing this sweeping 
statement. Surely it is not what the history of all primitive 
revelations declares ; nor is it the experience of the average 
man of to-day as we know him, to be "intuitively conscious of 
the infinite and the eternal and of what transcends the world." 
When Revelation has awakened in the mind these thoughts 
and images, then man becomes more or less conscious of them ; 
but never, so far as we learn from history, only of his imme- 
diate consciousness. If it be objected that Revelation itself 
is the means of an immediate or intuitive vision and inward 
hearing on man's part — this would upset the theory of Eucken, 
because it would assert the "Characteristic or individual Re- 
ligion" as the origin, instead of the "universal stuff or flow, 
out of which this individual religion is supposed to be grad- 
ually engendered. 

In the same fanciful vein Eucken continues that the "love 
of God becomes the ruling motive of the man's life, and brings 
him an inner relation with the whole scope of reality." Truly 
a marvellous result of a purely self -conceived image of the 
infinite and the eternal or the coming into man's life of the 
universal religious flow ; for he asserts that this flow "must 
all remain human and a part of the Universal Religion." "Ijf 
it cuts itself off in a peculiar religion and evolves a specific 
piety it easily sinks into rigidity and pharisaic conceit." Dog- 
mas and rites, he says, are expressions of their types of spirit- 
ual life, but should be constantly changeable to meet the great 
transformations taking place in the world of thought. 



SIX 

"While we criticize the tradition of forms, we must develop 
the essence of religion more vigorously and bring the new life 
which unfolds itself in religion into full action and transform 
it into our own life. This will protect us against all paralyzing 
doubt !" and "give us a sure foothold on the storms of the age. 
Life and its activity alone can produce a Religion of life !" 

There must be, he says, an "impartial criticism." "Such 
criticism does not lead to disintegration when it proceeds from 
the kernel of religion itself, instead of from the outside." But 
since all comes from the "outside," we are compelled to ask 
here, why not criticism from the "outside ?" Where is the ker- 
nel of religion but in the "outside," the flow? Especially if 
the flow when arrested by dogma and piety into "character 
religion" becomes thereby vitiated or contracted? 

Swedenborg has told us that "all religion has to do with life 
and that the life of religion is to do good. But the good 
he clearly defines as something in accord with the revealed will 
of a Being of perfect love and wisdom, — this revelation being 
in the form of precepts, or commandments laying down man's 
duty toward God and toward the neighbor, which are to be 
obeyed in the common acts of life. It seems much like a strain 
of high-sounding but empty words — this talking of doubt be- 
ing cured by a religion with no permanent convictions and no 
teaching; and of a new life being entered into, by establish- 
ing the self-engendered Deity in the centre of one's being and 
as identical with one's self. For, that every aid from tradition, 
or external rite or a recognized supernatural, whether in a 
Gospel or a miraculous birth and resurrection and historic re- 
demption, is to be utterly cast aside, is one of Eucken's most 
emphatic demands. To worship Jesus, he says, "would be the 
intolerable deification of a human being!" 

Eucken, therefore, has no need of a central Lord of Life 
or Divine Redeemer other than the God conceived of as a 
powerful, a loving "Omnipresence that enters into life with its 
reinforcing redeeming effects." 

The Virgin birth of our Lord is rejected and therewith the 
Resurrection and Ascension. Only the human Jesus remains, 
His incomparable life and His teaching of the dignity of man 
as the child of God. 



SEVEN 

"The Virgin birth (says Eucken) is as irrelevant to the faith 
and a living Redeemer as is the empty grave." 

Throwing away, in this manner, all the Church's strong- 
holds of a divine Revelation and a heavenly Doctrine, Eucken 
offers, after all, little besides a flow of eloquent phrases and 
poetic fancies for the final refuge of the human soul seeking 
rest in a rational conviction or a spiritual faith : 

"I admit (he says) the waters of the surface are all against religion; 
but the under currents of man's soul are all in its favor. Modern cul- 
ture has given us many a problem for which it is, (itself), no match! 

"This yearning and craving amid the unwholesomeness of a secular 
merely human culture, the intolerable shallowness of life which cannot 
reach beyond its circuit, this rush to a first principle without love or 
without soul, — how do you account for them? 

"On the other side, the profound longing for greater stability and 
permanence ! This yearning to partake of the 'higher life' than that 
which the process of natural or social self-preservation will allow us! 

"Believe me, this incessantly growing impulse running through all 
nations and all civilizations of the East and of the West is in itself 
a proof that powers are at work in our souls of which our critics will 
have to give account !" 

Which is somewhat of an anticlimax ; inasmuch as no critic 
will be more called to account for this mental unrest that he 
who, like Eucken himself, has cast aside all objective aid and 
supernatural authority, and trusted himself only to the un- 
directed and turbulent "flow" of purely natural self-evolved 
religion. How almost pitiful is the adoption of this stagelike 
artificial tone of a pious humility and dependence which it is 
the object of the entire argument to destroy as a thing only 
of the past ! 

"We are seekers ! (he says) our achievements are not per- 
fect yet !" Is he in earnest here, or is it quite innocently, that 
he introduces this bit of satire out of Goethe's Faust, — where 
Wagner, the student, says to the master — "I know much! 
Still I would know all \" 

"We are serving (says Eucken), a great end which is not the crea- 
tion of our brains, but set up for us in the process of evolution !" 

Why not let it be a "creation of our brains" — if the "pro- 
cess" is all the cause of the great end which we are to serve ! 



EIGHT 

"We are partakers of the work of the Spirit : nothing can be in vain 
if done with a view to our great end and a faithful fulfillment of our 
task."* 

But how can a man do anything with a view to one's "great 
end," or with a view to a "task," which end and task have 
never had an existence prior to their evolving in human ex- 
perience, and have never been made known by revelation to 
man ; nor ever can be known as a finality, but only as a guess 
or an assurance for the time being ? 

To sum up Eucken's position, it would seem to be that we 
are in an inmost flow of spirit seeking a centre or divine, in- 
stead of being ourselves in the outer sphere recipients of the 
influx from an eternal, all-forming, all-sustaining Divine 
within. But that this so-called spirit is other than a refine- 
ment of matter, or of the unintelligent, would seem to follow 
from the proposition that it is only through a process of 
evolution that it attains to these qualities and enters upon the 
realms of mind and morals and the finally-to-be-evolved divine. 

BERGSON. 

To turn from Eucken to the other acknowledged leader of 
the philosophic thought of the day. Professor Henri Berg- 
son, of the College of France, it is a relief to handle principles 
which are honestly held out without any garb of religious af- 
fectation, and which yet are quite as serviceable for arriving at 
a reason of religion as are those of more sanctimonious name. 

Bergson is thoroughly honest, plain-spoken and fearless in 
the announcement of his ideas, and his very system guarantees 
his boundless freedom in carrying them to a result, inasmuch 
as all systems, all knowledge, all life, all reason itself is only, 
according to him, forever in the making; never made, never 
complete, — not even known or completed in thought before- 
hand. Life is the flow of an eternal now, which is eternally 
new because made up anew each instant of all the past, and 
so shaping, controlling anew, all the future. 

In the place of Eucken's flow of "spirit" and of "universal 



*For the above extracts, see Rudolf Eucken. London. 191 1. 
Notes for Religion and Life. 



NINE 

religion," Bergson unfolds to us the flow of universal vital 
impulse, the elan vital which seems to consist, at first, of pur- 
poseless motion, but which acquires purpose, character, plan, 
anticipation from its constantly new relations to its counterpart 
in the universal being — inert matter. This affords the reaction, 
the bumps and shocks and turnings which shape the vital im- 
pulse into character, or consciousness; this consciousness, in 
turn, struggles against its confining shell of matter, until here 
and there it bursts through into a realm of freedom from 
restraint, — and so into a domination over matter itself. This 
is .reason and the free intellect, and in its freedom it becomes 
creative and each new moment of consciousness is the birth of 
a new world. 

Thus what is given as presupposed in Bergson is a dual 
world or an existence of two elements, vital impulse and the 
crust or covering of inert matter. 

The whence of these he does not trouble himself about ex- 
cept negatively, inasmuch as his very system requires that God 
or the End, Purpose, and Plan of the Universe could never 
have existed at the beginning, since it is only coming into be- 
ing, or shaping itself, as it goes along. As our consciousness, 
our life, our destiny in not promised for us beforehand — is 
not "ready-made" — but is always in the making, so is God, as 
intention, conceived of as the End or shaping destiny of the 
world also always in the making. 

It is this freedom from any restraint, whether of an original 
plan or of a present control, that, according to Bergson, brings 
the long-desired solution of the problem how to reconcile man's 
freewill with a course, preordained from the beginning. The 
solution is in the bringing of the entire universe, all life and 
being, to its centre in the individual self which is conscious 
only of the now. This again is evolving the centre from the 
circumference and making the universe self -centered rather 
than God-centered. 

However deficient and revolutionary this system may seem 
in its relation to traditional thought and belief, there will be 
found in it points of deepest interest to the student of Swe- 
denborg, as they seem to unite in a way, in opening to the 



TEN 

philosopher, a new stand-point for a universal world-view 
and a real advance in spiritual thinking. 

While nothing could be farther from Swedenborg than the 
abolishing of a God of infinite love and mercy as the source 
of all things and as determining and governing all things by 
predetermined laws of Order, still when we come to analyze 
the idea of the past and the future as terms of time and not 
of eternity and think of God from the latter idea, or as the 
eternal now, we may find a reconciliation between what seemed 
before only conflicting ideas. If the soul's consciousness of 
the "now" embraces all its finite being, why should not the con- 
sciousness of the Infinite embrace eternity in its now, and be- 
hold all as present ? 

Unquestionably Bergson's idea of freedom as that of the 
vital impulse breaking more and more through the bonds of 
inert matter is entirely in accord with Swedenborg's teaching 
of the reverse process of God's self -limitation in the evolution 
of human freedom ; so that, like the Father to the Prodigal, 
He divides his living among his sons, and that only so, 
out of a society of souls conscious of themselves as free, 
could God build up really a heaven to eternity. 

The meaning of this freedom as a factor in evolution, and 
perpetual creation all lies in the conception of time and of 
"the now." 

There is, according to this idea, no past and no future in 
man's actual life, nor will there ever be; man's whole life is 
in the consciousness of the now and this is the product of all 
the past and, the womb out of which springs the future, 
but a future of perpetual new births. 

Especially interesting to the student of Swedenborg's psy- 
chology is Bergson's doctrine of the nature and the function of 
the memory as building up the now, out of the past, and as thus 
constituting a kind of perpetual limbus or spiritual body which 
shall preserve our identity. Duration, (la Duree) does not 
suggest a distinct past still existing, or a distant future; it is 
merely the perpetual flow, in the present moment, of the past 
into the future. Time is constructed by the aid of memory 
out of this duration by an intellectual effort ; but the more real 



!:_ ,,, . '* - ELEVEN 

i 

life is not this intellectually created and formed world of time, 
but the world intuitively felt in the ever recurring now. 

It is easy to see how this all bears upon the doctrine of 
predestination, and of the eternity of the heavens or the hells. 
The fixed "intellectual" terms of time are to be translated — as 
affecting our real conscious life — into the intensive terms of 
state. As to memory, according to Bergson : 

"Memory adds continually to present state and so forever builds 
anew. 

"Duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into 
the future and moulds, as it advances. 

"The past is not put away ; it follows us up at every instant. 

"We think with only a small part of our past, but we desire, will 
and act, with our entire past our entire bent of soul. 

"Our duration is irreversible ; we can see our memory from our in- 
tellect but not from our will." Compare with Swedenborg's Doctrine 
of the external and internal memory. (H. H. 462-469.) 

"What we do depends upon what we are: we are also what we do, 
and so we are creating ourselves continually." "To exist is to change." 

Bergson's doctrine of the soul's Immortality, affords, per- 
haps, better than any other one feature, a basis of comparison 
and of valuation — by the side of other systems. There would 
seem, at first glance, to be a distinctly Christian idea in this 
placing of will higher than thought, this making the interior 
and will-memory the enduring one, and making the life to con- 
sist in the deed rather than in the thinking about it. What 
could be more graphic, more refreshing, frank and bold than 
this description of the relation of life and nature. 

"All organized beings from humblest to highest, from first origins to 
now, everywhere and always, evidence a single impulsion — the inverse 
of the movement of "matter, and in itself indivisible. All the living 
hold together and all yield to the same tremendous push; the animal 
takes its stand on the plant, man bestrides animality, and the whole of 
humanity in space and time is one immense army, and all spring, be- 
side and before and behind each one of us, in one overwhelming charge, 
able to beat down every resistance and clear the most formidable ob- 
stacles : perhaps even death!" (p. 27). 

Here we seem to have an intimation at least of personal sur- 
vival after death, as possible. But here again we are to be 
disappointed, as throughout Bergson's entire system, by the 



TWELVE 

return of the fatal blight of Orientalism with its doctrine of 
the final absorption of the individual into the whole. 

Regarding personal immortality, he says: 

"If there are souls capable of independent life, whence do they 
come? Wherl do they enter into this body arising from a mixed cell 
derived from the bodies of parents? 

"We can answer only by resolving to see the life of the body just 
where it really is on the road that leads to the life of the spirit; but it 
will there have no longer to do with definite living beings" (ibid, p. 
269). That is, the personality is lost! 

"Life, as a whole, from the initial impulsion that thrust it into the 
world will appear as a wave which rises and is opposed by the de- 
scending movement of matter. This opposition drives it into a vortex; 
it divides it into distinct individualities. Then souls are continually 
being created, which, nevertheless, in a certain sense pre-existed. 

"Souls are nothing else than little rills into which the drive of life 
sunders itself, flowing through the body of humanity." 

So we come back to only a familiar form of Orientalism. 

What is unique about Bergson's philosophy is that it asserts 
the doctrine of the flux as belonging not only to everything 
else, but even to his own system ; — if that can be called a system 
which is momentarily changing, and is building itself up, not 
on a foreseen plan, but on a plan that develops from stage to 
stage. The end of this development seems, in Bergson, to be 
the sad end of the pessimist — the dissolution into the original 
formless but creative life-impulse; and so the loss of all in- 
dividual immortality. But why, if all things change, may not 
Bergson's vision change as to the end of life's prospect? Why 
may he not rise, too, to the conception and conviction of the 
motive of creation itself as nothing less than the Infinite Love 
desiring to provide for man a heaven to eternity ? 

CONCLUSION. 

Finally, as to the spiritual content to be found in either 
of these two popular systems. 

We must define, first of all, what we mean by "spiritual." 
If spirit is a refined order of ether; or a kind of spermatic 
dust scattered through the universe ; or a "universal religious 
sense" of a supernatural that is capable of producing a God 
and destroying him to be replaced by another, — then both of 



THIRTEEN 

these systems have this content not only in abundance but to 
the full — as the very working principle of the evolution of a 
centre from the expanse, or of reason out of that which was 
without reason. 

But if by the spirit is meant the life of will and thought pro- 
ceeding from God's infinite Love and Wisdom, like heat and 
light from the spiritual sun of a spiritual world, and flowing 
down into human minds on earth as into its formed receptacles, 
— then we must regard these systems as offering no place for 
such a content. As Swedenborg with his powerful and awful 
directness and clearness states it : 

Those who say that they believe in an invisible Divine, which they 
call the Being of the universe from which all things had their exist- 
ence, and reject belief in regard to the Lord, are shown by experience 
that they believe in no God; because the invisible Divine is to them 
something like nature in her first principles, which is not an object of 
faith and love because it is not an object of thought {Heaven and 
Hell, n. 3). 

That is, it is like looking upon vacancy for our object of 
vision, or like endeavoring to feel the throbs of affection beat- 
ing upon us from a problem in geometry. Even the eternal 
rule of three we cannot turn into a God whom we can love 
and worship, nor can we from a multiplicity of such rules, 
conceive of the evolution of motion, of a world and of man. 



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